know anything about the casino business. >> the c-span radio app makes it easy to follow the election wherever you are heard it is free to download from the apple play.re or google get audio coverage and up-to-the-minute schedule information for c-span radio and and historypodcasts programs. stay up to date on all the election coverage or c-span's radio app means you always have c-span, go. panelwill hear from a that discusses how black americans understood freedom to the lens of economics, marriage and citizenship. this was part of a three-day conference hosted by the smithsonian museum and the american historic association.

it's called the future of the african-american and pass. it's an hour and 45 minutes. a --am from columbia in university monitoring this second session on slavery and freedom. i want to thank the organizers of this conference. we all know how much work went into putting this whole thing together so thank you very much while -- to those from the museum and the association. ago i gave my last class at columbia university. i am now writing off into the sunset. [applause] of retirement. you will indulge me for just a minute as i read what

briefly on my own experience in relation to this field of african american history. emblematic of several things that have happened in the last couple of generations. i grew up in a family in which african-american history, in theh ignored education that i got in grades and high school, nevertheless, the black experience was considered in my family central to american history. and -- were friends of my family. i still have a photo my mother gave of myself sitting on paul robeson's shoulders, at age two probably seemed like a long way up. my uncle philip -- was prolific in the fields of labor history

and african-american history. my father also is a story in publish the book on -- a book on black military experience. part in thei took march on washington in 1963. i also took part in the much less well-known march in washington in 1957. not well-known part of our history. ,s an undergraduate at columbia i was lucky enough to take my first history course with a , blackor who assigned reconstruction in america. that was not done at an ivy league institution. the first taught course and african-american history ever given in the over 200 year history of columbia

university. the field was just beginning to get going outside of black adversities, where it had always existed, of course. i gave eric holder a "b". that was a respectable grade back then. obama issueddent an executive order raising that great. -- formertudents students here at the conference are rita roberts and stephanie small world -- a smallwood who are blogging away. who use on action last night. when she was an undergraduate she had to split her time

between excellent historical work and organizing to get holdingsto do best its that were connected with so africa -- south africa. and leslie harris, who is also on our program as one of our students. i chair the committee later on that established the institute for research in african-american studies at columbia and hired as our first director, the late and lamented --. this is why i want to tip my hat to money -- and his coworkers. this museum that will open soon is a dream come true for all of inwho have labored african-american history for a long time. .hank you and everyone

[applause] the first battle has settled the question who is black america, this panel has to decide what the narrative paradigm is that best structures african-american history. one of the most influential works in this area in the 20th franklin's john hope textbook from slavery to freedom. that is a simple, compelling idea of slavery's freedom. it suggests that emancipation is the pivot of the black experience and perhaps of the whole american experience. there was also an alternative textbook out there which many of you are familiar with, from plantation to get a -- ghetto. one form of exploitation

succeeded by another form of exploitation. i think it is fair to say that slavery to freedom narrative has been the dominant one, although under considerable challenge in the current issue of the journal of southern history, carole pemberton has an article on writing, the freedom narrative, which is a new essay on both that challenge the celebratory account from slavery to freedom. looks like jim downs escape from freedom,more than freedom's frontier, one of the things i hope our congress will enable us to discuss is this familiar slavery to freedom paradigm makes sense as a way of understanding the trajectory of rock -- black history.

and why at this moment, when people might want to field celebrity tori we are coming to of a second term of the nation's first african-american president. another question is what are the implications for understanding from they and freedom trend towards localizing american history and african-american history, and also emphasizing the connections between slavery and capitalism. when the interpretive focus become so broad and global and abstract how can individual historical actors be factored into the story? what role can slave resistance, for example, play in a story that is operating in the global

-- at the global level. then there's the question of reconstruction and how we should think about that hereinafter the end of slavery. should it be viewed as a southern event, what happens to the african-american component if we expanded to include the west, expand its timeframe. does the sentry the south reduce the importance of that era for african-american history. how does this era of slavery and emancipation exist today in public consciousness, in movies come in memorials, and flags and museum. ?ow should we commemorate it these are all big questions. we have a panel of big thinkers who can look at them.

some of the photographs are a little antiquated. in the booklet that we have, i will not repeat their bios, this . brendader qu stevenson from ucla. brenda was stuck in berlin yesterday. her plane was canceled and she is in the air as we need. i will read her remarks secondly. universityrom duke and a net gordon reed from harvard history department and law school. a fat 10ive them each minutes. i turn the floor over to walter

johnson. [applause] >> thank you. i can't say anything as dramatic as i was raised on the shoulder says paul robeson. meet --. sponsors.to the , and an honor to be here to reacquaint myself and to meet so many of the people who are my heroes. i want to acknowledge my , who was the first person who help me think through the fact that if we are going to

try to write african-american history we need to imagine we will have to reconstruct the very categories of historical analysis. that is an idea that i think has been shared and expressed by a lot of the folks in this room. i want to try today to walk a little bit around the question of freedom, and to try to think through the notion of freedom and to figure out how a certain foreshortened version of freedom has shaped the history of slavery. thata sent me a secret tax -- text, that i get her time.

[applause] can find the statement in one variety or another. dehumanizes inflamed people. i think their problems that unfold from there. i think they are ethical problems in that statement. i am going to try to do everything briefly and stop saying that i'm going to do it briefly. part of the problem with that statement is that the institution of slavery is one of infinite variety, the humane things that -- the inhumane things that humans do to each other. one of the things they do is to misunderstand the character of human beings. there is an implication of permanence in the notion of the

humanization that is baleful. it is much more productive to think of the condition of humanity and what it means to be a humana -- human under slavery. under the terrorist again perverse pleasures of slaveholding relied up from the notion -- upon the notion of freedom. problem a deep ethical and historians of the 20th and 21st century casting doubt on the humanity of pass to store go it raisescal actors. when theion of african-american people were human again. finally, i think it takes a statement about our own perceived ethical distance from the perpetrators, our ability to cast them as in human and takes

that and attributes it as a characteristic of the victims, they have been dehumanized. there is an essential difference between arguing somebody acted inhumanely and arguing the effect of their action was to dehumanize the victim. behind all of these slippages, i think there is an unacknowledged ethical premise. i'm going to read you a quotation from a not so recent but very influential book on history. i read it because -- not because it is particularly obtuse, but it is emblematic of presumptions which frame a lot of work done on the issue of slavery and some have framed some of the work i have done on the history of slavery. whenever masters implicitly or explicitly recognized the independent will and volition of their slaves, they acknowledged the humanity of their bond

people, extracting this admission was in fact a form of slave resistance. because slaves opposed the dehumanization inherent in their status. powerful sentence that collapses three different things. it collapses the notion of humanity into the notion of resistance, right? people are human when they resist. that leaves aside the question, for instance, of despair. what about enslaved despair? what about enslaved suicide? and correspondingly, we see we do not have histories of these things the way we should, again with the exception of mel paynter's slavery. the other thing is it leaves out

the possibility of enslaved flourishing, for reasons we can all understand, the minute i say the words happy and slave together, nevertheless, we have no history of laughter in slavery. we have a very, very thin history of love. there is a collapsing of enslaved humanity into resistance, i.e. into the terms of enslaved people's relationship with slaveholder. finally, there is a collapsing of the notion of resistance into independent will and volition, and that is the thing i will focus on the most. there is a collapsing of the notion into a particular form of what i would call the notion of what a human being is, a person who makes independent decisions. that is a notion of human subjectivity i will note would be foreign to nat turner.

nat turner does not think he is a person who has independent will and volition. he thinks he is the fingertip of god's providence. he acts out of the notion of sacred duty rather than independence. i want to call that into question. now the thing that i guess i can confidently say is that that figure of freedom is the very figure of freedom that is being promulgated all over the world by the european imperial slaveholding powers as the notion of freedom. it is a notion of freedom, freedom based on the rights of the citizen that is historically framed by the problem of slavery and empire. so what i am interested in trying to do in the slightly longer and more convoluted paper i have posted is to try to

rework our notions of justice and human rights in the light of the history of slavery. it is to try to treat slavery as the central moral event of modernity, to try to re-theorize justice and freedom from the perspective of slavery and really the perspective of the continent of africa. doing so would require us to give a thorough going account of what sort of institution slavery was and what we think of the enduring ethical and historical relevance of slavery, which i am planning to do in the remaining three minutes i have. [laughter] walter johnson: following cedric andnson and w.e.b. du bois, this is the dubois of

as well as the essay on the souls of white folk which you should read instead of listening to the rest of what i have to say. i want to try to think about slavery as a form of racial capitalism. i want to think about the histories of exploitation through capitalism and racial domination through negro phobia, as in fact identical to one another in many ways. it would take a lot of work to actually substantiate for you the notion that when we say the word capitalism, we should always say the word slavery. that they are not two different things. that is why want to say racial capitalism, but i will give you a few examples of why i want us to try to push, to insist upon saying racial capitalism, to

insist upon an analysis of anti-blackness alongside our analysis, inextricable from the analysis of capitalism. if you cannot use the word capitalism to describe the exportation for sale of 12 million people across the atlantic ocean, i am not sure what usefulness the term has. it seems to me that is the first challenge to the history of capitalism that does not acknowledge slavery and its -- as its central aspect. but one can map what we take to be the capitalist economy of the 19th century, particularly great britain, the capitalist economy for those who want to define capitalism as if it was only something that happened in manchester. if you actually make a map of that economy, you recognize it

is an agricultural economy that works on a yearly basis of advances. what happens is the cotton merchants in liverpool make credit advances to planters in louisiana. and those advances are made against the cotton crop. sometimes the cotton crop comes in short, and the advance from liverpool to louisiana is not going to get paid off by the time the cotton comes in. so then there is a debt, and that debt has to be collateralized. so there is the atlantic system of slavery, which everybody acknowledges the 19th century to be the moment where capitalism dawned in the cotton mills in lancashire. the two modes of collateral are human beings and land. it is not that slavery was capitalist. enslaved people were the capital.

the other form of collateral is land, and that is land that we could just kind of here relate to the paper that ty miles did this morning. that is expropriated land. most notably, that land is covered by the supreme court decision, johnson versus macintosh of 1823. my colleague gordon-reed could correct what i'm going to say, but this is a foundational case in history of united states property law. if you go back to the origins, and try to go back and figure out why is it we legally owned the things we owned. at the bottom of that legal trail, you will find johnson versus macintosh. this is the case which says that native americans are not allowed to sell land to individual white

settlers. all native american land must be aggregated under the federal government. in order to be distributed through a capitalist land market to white settlers. so at the very bottom of property relations in the united states, there is imperialism, racial difference, and capitalist mode of distribution. that is the foundation. that is the foundation of our property law. so those are some of the pathways i would try to use to elucidate this notion of racial capitalism, which i can do more on the questions and it is elucidated a bit better in the paper, in the paper that is posted on the website. what i what to do with the low bit of time i have remaining is outline what i think the benefit would be of bringing slavery to the center of our question of what we call human

rights or global claims of justice to understand slavery in this particular version of slavery i have just tried to outline as the central, moral event of modernity. mounts thel, it critique of injustice from the standpoint of african america, native america, the global south and not from europe. it makes europe a central problem rather than the site of the elaboration of notions of justice. secondly, and this goes to some of the questions earlier, it is focused on the question of extraction and distribution with between classes and areas of the world. it proposes a generalization of the account of the historical wrongs based on the experience of those in europe's dark

working-class, so it takes the experience of dark working-class of the world and generalizes that as the experience we should use to characterize justice claims everywhere. it is historically deep. it analyzes and emphasizes ways in which present distribution of privileges and projections are related to past patterns. it is in that way, i think, a powerful antidote to colorblind liberalism, right? it says we need to think about historical distribution, not simply contemporary distributions. if this is on slavery as a wrong goes to gender and sexuality, in the ways alienation, subordination of reproduction of

one group of people to the purposes of another were the core feature of the human wrongs of slavery. it brings questions of gender, reproduction and sexuality to , the heart of our question of global justice. finally, and i think that this is important. if one is really to understand the history of capitalism and slavery, one would write a paper about the instrumentalization of beings to the instrumentalization of nature, to think about the development of cotton plants, cotton plants were genetically hybridized to meet the capacity of a human hand. and human beings were ethically and violently narrowed down to the capacity of their hands. those two things, the instrumentalization of human

being and nature are directly related to one another. i think finally, we would want to imagine that from the standpoint of slavery, the history of slavery, we can their eyes a notion of global justice that is vigorously environmental but is not simply green. it is not predicated on politics or sustainability of standing order. it is theorized according to the politics of sustainability of a future imagined more just order. , thank you very much. [applause] eric foner: thank you, walter. 's paper ishenson's

entitled, us never had big funerals or weddings on the place. the ritualized black family in the wake of freedom. lorna was clear about her complaints in rural life in mississippi. slave people could not create, celebrate, protect or ritualized family life. according to her, there were few ritualized events that signified the beginning or end of kinship ties. us never had no big funerals or weddings on the place, didn't have no marrying of any kind. folks in those days just sort of hitched up together and called themselves man and wife. on the surface it might not , appear to be correct, or at least not applicable. with regard to marriage, some enslaved blacks in the south jumped the broom and some even had elaborate weddings. but there is a more profound truth about the social identity and status of enslaved blacks. none of their weddings signified a legally binding marriage contract. and the actual bride and groom

freely chose a few of the designated aspects of their marriage rituals. it was not unusual for slaveowners to insist on certain details of the marriage ritual that turned the event into something of a minstrel show for a white audience's benefit. while there is little doubt many enslaved people who married typically found some meaning and even joy in the events that constituted that they were husband and wife. these rituals were fraught with the profound irony that defined life the irony of , being both a person and property. no matter how elaborate or cursory the marriage ritual, enslaved husband and wives were always aware of its devastating limitations. slave masters and mistresses however viewed the slave marriage ritual in other ways, as a form of entertainment. the beginning of the birth of

new slave property, as a way to demonstrate their benevolence, and as a form of sublunary -- disciplinary control through the threat of filial loss. they do not conceive of the slave marriage ritual as a romantic, sacred, legally binding event as ideally expressed in the property world of the southern gentry. my talk was morning explores the marital rituals of black southerners before and after the u.s. civil war as a window into the ways african-americans marked freedom in the 1860's and beyond with public and private ritualized events that differentiated and designated their new status and human dignity as unfettered men and women. when no longer a bondwoman for example, the same door frank's who complained of having no family signifying rituals slaves, made certain her new free status included in markers

of familial behavior that had been denied her when they were enslaved. two years after the civil war, married a friedman. she chose her own husband, married legally and bore her children legitimately. she had an elaborate wedding followed by a big supper. her husband concurred with her description of the rituals noting when i was on the constable, i met dora and was married. it was a big wedding and feast. like so many others that struggled to define and live in freedom after emancipation family life as a free person , with dora and ted frank's meant in part of the exercise of legal and public familial ceremonies and rituals such as weddings. unlike these marital performances that had occurred before emancipation, postbellum

weddings pronounced a black black family to the larger world that free men and women had a right to claim marital relations, claim control over the intimate aspects of their bodies, to live under one roof, and to maintain their children. temple herndon was certain why, at age 31, she was glad when the civil war ended and freedom came. she and her husband could now live altogether at the same time. for her, freedom was fundamentally coded as a united family. i was glad the war stopped, she said, because we could be together all the time instead of just saturday and sunday. hundreds of thousands, if not more couples married while enslaved or wanted to marry after slavery ended did not hesitate to participate in new legally binding nuptials. to do so, they drew a line

between slavery and freedom. post slavery wedding rituals also signified personal choice and were an opportunity for black men and women to openly display african-american romantic love and cultural aesthetics. freedom also meant the ability to profess one's beauty, one and emotion, and one's intellect, personal attributes that had been routinely destroyed or exported during slavery. among the confusing, complicated, and somewhat conflicting patchwork of instructions from governmental organizations, military, teachers and former owners, most freed couples sought legitimacy for their marital relations and their children. those who had jumped the room before emancipation went right to the point of why they chose to remarry after gaining freedom.

they wanted to ritualize their marriages in the manner that free people typically ritualized theirs, not as slaves. my mother married at thomas pope' place, a former slave are called, and a man who could read and write to marry them. he married lots of blacks then. after the war, many blacks married over again because they did not know if the first marriage was good or not. charles davis explains it in a similar fashion. my mommy and daddy got married after freedom because they did not get the time for a wedding before. they called themselves man and wife for a long time before they were really married. willis dukes was absolute about the legitimacy of his postbellum marriage, noting we did not jump over no broom, neither. we was married like white folks with flowers and cake and everything. as far as he was concerned, because he and his bride shared the same marriage rituals as whites, their marriage had to be

legitimate. former slave gus clark was also emphatic, i had three wives. i didn't have no weddings, but i married them according to law. my first two wives is dead. mildred graves recalled as a slave, her mistress had given her a cast-off dress and she stepped over a broomstick. but after the war, we had a real wedding with a preacher. that cost one dollar. mary reynolds also had been married by stepping over a broom. after freedom, i got married and had it put in the book by the preacher. those who decided and had the ability to marry as individual couples brought serious thought and planning to their manifestations of the marital bonds. clothing, bonds, venue decor, audience composition, and the license, and the dance party were all important to consider in these marriage rituals. many of these choices also spoke

to the aesthetic values of late 19th century southern blacks and their skills as designers, seamstresses, cooks, and speakers that they brought with them out of slavery into lives -- their new lives as free people. some of these preparations also suggest communal efforts and ties, black and white, that shaped southern black life in the first decades after slavery ended. postbellum brides indicated in the assemblage process of clothing and adornment for body, hair, hands, and feet, those who were operative members of their communities and kinship networks as free people. some of this pre-wedding activity indicates as well active economic relationships between working white and black women at a time when fledging local southern economies were a burden for both. other aspects of weddings that benefited from contributions also suggest ties across racial

lines, some more cutting than others. bonnie bonds' employer donated her wedding cake. she hardly was the only former slave whose wedding was subsidized by whites. employers had good reason for lending a helping hand. given the difficulty in retaining workers after emancipation, many were anxious to impress their employees, many of them former slaves, with tokens of generosity which suggested they supported black families who were loyal and good workers. moreover, it placed lights in the position of economic superiority and encouraged the ever popular myth of southern paternalism. it could be a blessing and burden. it indicated how involved former owners and employers remained in a personal lives of the black workforce and documented sustained black economic dependency.

it barely disguised the lingering financial exploitation whites imposed on black laborers, leaving little ability to fund their own wedding or create new separate households. black workers, in conclusion, also may have been able to leverage their employers' need for labor to get them the assistance they needed to have these elaborate marriage rituals. so thanks to brenda, we will welcome her when she gets here, and now thavolia glymph. [applause] thavolia glymph: good morning. so the title of my talk is between slavery and freedom, and

i took eric seriously but not completely. i tried to follow some of his instructions. so one day on a baltimore street corner, it was february of 1861. two black women were overheard discussing the state of the union. the dispute between the north and the south. one of them said, "wait until the fourth of march, and then when i slept my mistress in the face. 1861, was no date snatched out of thin air. it was the date leaked and was to be inaugurated. and on that day and that event, the two negresses saw the opening of new political ground in the war against slavery. president,incoming

they prepared to lead a different war. he prepared to lead a war to reunite the country as a slave country. they represented the black who made no detour through the middle ground, who had no doubt from the beginning what the central issue was. by the time the confederacy had been defeated, the slaves in this country had suffered massive defeats but they had also won big and small victories. those victories more than defeats helped to redraw the map of the united states. in 1864 when johnson's name wartime federal roll, and she described as a citizen colored, that description registered a very

small but a very big victory. celinda johnson would have to wait another four years before the 14th amendment came and her citizenship was ratified, but in 1864, an agent of the federal government listed her, a slave woman, as a citizen, signaled just how far the war to put down the slaveholders' re- rebellion had come. just how far the union had been transformed, in no small part to the people like celinda. she was joined hundreds of thousands of slaves that fled plantations and forced a merger of the union war and the slave'' war. like many mergers today, it was a messy coming together, always fraught with the possibility that one or the other would withdraw from the merger.

but slave resistance and support of emancipation and the union redirected both the course of the war and emancipation. as most of you know lincoln , admitted as much in his famous letter to the citizens of springfield, illinois. they had opposed his issuing the proclamation. he told them in no uncertain terms that they could "fight on to save the union exclusively," but he also reminded them he had issued the proclamation to help them in saving the union. and here of course, he was talking in particular about the role of black men in the union army, that their service and freedom were inextricably linked. he would not take the proclamation back. wouldte, the party that elect a president for the restoration platform would lose the colored force, and that

force being lost, the union would be powerless." lincoln increasingly understood also, as did congress and union commanders, that women, black women, the mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of black soldiers would have to be offered the same deal, freedom. negro women and children are left behind sherman wrote, , they become a fruitful source of trouble. indeed. over the past four decades, scholars have demolished the long-standing argument of historians that portrayed slavery as a benevolent institution and sidelined the contributions black people made to union and to freedom. we no longer tolerate such nonsense as that by robert caudle, the founding member of

the southern historical occ nation that wrote slave hours were long but not strenuous. and from a psychological side since he had never known freedom, he looked upon slavery not as degradation but as a routine. we also would no longer tolerate calhoun'ense as john c statement that slavery was a mercy. despite this, a large body of scholarship explored in great and gritty details the process of emancipation. we are still struggling with the question of what came next, what the slaves got a return, what freedom meant. it is now a hotly contested question among scholars. i want to talk about whether or not these consequences -- some scholars now have concluded it seems that slavery and the civil

war were so bad, so damaged black people that when freedom came, they could hardly stand on the ground. they could hardly stand on the ground of freedom. some seem to be asking, did freedom even ever come? certainly, the slow and tepid response of lincoln's administration to what was a humanitarian crisis represented two black people huge obstacles in their bid for freedom. this response contributed wittingly and unwittingly to the violence of emancipation. but once the federal government had embraced emancipation, whether it was tepid or not, it a major breach occurred in the nation's commitment to slavery. so i want to make two important points to counter the recent

scholarship eric mentioned in a recent article in the journal of southern history. the vast majority of black people did not die in the civil war. they lived. they fought to live. they put past struggles into play in the formation of a radical politics that would inform the postwar struggle. back to the worker who argued compellingly if the master confronted the slave from the safety of a mobilized white community, slaves stared back. they were also mobilized no matter how brutalized and ravaged by the slave trade and arbitrary rule. this begins with recognition that enslaved people expected to fight. they expected they would have to fight for their freedom.

they understood the brutality that had come with the making of slavery would accompany its unmaking. that they would die and suffer , many would be for any got to freedom. that their families would be again be torn apart. as they gathered up their families to flee the plantation, they knew they were in for harder times. while the 150th anniversary of the civil war has now past, and for many of us, thank god, we and scholarly attention has turned to the postwar amendments, the work of figuring out what freedom meant remains unfinished. civil war refugee camps are one place where we could take the temperature of this question. the movement and displacement of 500,000 enslaved people convinced over four years has no parallel people in u.s. history.

the domestic slave trade moved one million, but that was spread out over 70 years. uprooted in the midst of war, enslaved people and free people expressed,, the trauma of families broken and shattered by violence, they experienced a new disease environment. but they also experienced more, and most of these people who ran away ended up in refugee camps, were women and children. the fugitive history of these women and children, their experience as refugees in refugee camps, and the punitive federal policies they faced are important to understanding what freedom meant. civil war refugee camps were places of trauma, containment, discipline, surveillance and the redeployment of notions of purity and pollution.

so we might work to extend, for example, the critical interventions about how languages of civilization and race and radical prospect resonated with one another and contributed to the logic and choreography of reservations and segregation in the american west. and this is sort of a proving ground for segregation and the separation of black and native people. i want to take that up and argue that we might extend the proving ground to the civil war. some of the men who would play leading roles in the war against native americans received their basic training in the civil war against african-american women and children as overseers of refugee camps where ideas about racial containment, contamination, and colonization circulated freely. black women in refugee camps

fought mightily against these notions and build communities in the camp's. they played a large role in ensuring more people made it to freedom than not. there would be tragic losses. there would be losses that had long-term political and psychological consequences. it would be women like margaret ferguson who came into a refugee --p in may seated and with emaciated and with a gangrenous leg and who had her leg amputated. there were women who saw slavery and life in refugee camp, decided to abort her child just as she was making it to freedom. these were hard decisions. decisions that made sense only in the context of the hard road to freedom. they are also the sort of

revisionist historical scholarship does not like. today looking at this evidence some historians see them as , proof of our need to temporary -- temper our judgment that emancipation came. some would see them as adjusting them -- suggesting that freedom was too hard for black people to make it onto the ground, the making of freedom was too hard for black people to make it onto the ground of freedom and do something more to extend the war they had been fighting. i want to ask that we back off that. the refugeek about and her work to help other black refugees survive and how they built new communities in refugee camps. i want us to remember and ashby

born a slave in kentucky and who , made it to freedom and had joined the exodus to kansas with her husband and children. i want us to step back and remember that it mattered that the losses and violence suffered in the war came on the heels of a centuries long business model in the united states had celebrated what walter jones smothering andhe g of naming -- misnamin enslaved people. it did not end this destruction, but it did mandate this nation would have to decide freedom anew. we make a hard turn in the direction accomplished too little to matter to much. like all wars, this war generated misery and death and it did not leave untouched noncombatants who had no arms, no battlefield plans, no homes,

or professional study of the history of war. no matter how hard it was to make, freedom made an important difference. there had been and would be other wars over slavery. other places where slavery's destruction was achieved through the force of arms. other places where the process of emancipation was prolonged and contested, places where war generated refugees and atrocities, places where slaveholders would be forced to their knees. the american civil war was not exceptional in these regards, but the history of the battle for freedom in this country still remains to be fully integrated in its national and global dimensions. i won't go into that here because i know i am out of time. i went to end, though, with this idea that comes in the work of many historians. the quote is that ordinary

people did ordinary things under the most difficult circumstance. enslaved in the border state of missouri only 60 miles from the , union stronghold at st. louis, luisa alexander was out of the reach of the terms of the emancipation proclamation. but she wrote her husband she was convinced freedom would come to her, but it would only come at the point of a bayonet. it was a resolution she welcomed, and a resolution through which she secured her freedom and we ought to applaud that kind of resolution. thank you. [applause]

annette gordon-reed: i would like to thank the organizers for inviting me to be a part of this vibrant conference. i am always happy to share a stage with eric, giving out people's grades. [laughter] annette gordon-reed: talking about people's age in reference to their photograph. [laughter] who are you talking about? but i am going to focus on my presentation on representations of slavery and memories of slavery in our every day built environment. after the events in ferguson, after the events in charleston, as you well know, there was a sea change in attitudes, particularly on the parts of young people who wanted to write a different story or to question the story that had been told about the way we viewed memorials, symbols, things that

represent slavery in our everyday life. i am sure you know across college campuses in this country as well as overseas that this is a global effort to try to make a difference, understanding the meaning of freedom by not accepting things that had been accepted as a matter of course. many people in this audience, i am sure all of you know, the famous notion that the south peacehe war but won the in that they were able to rewrite the story of what slavery and set the terms of engagement between african-american people in the south and whites in the south. it was an engagement that basically got rid of a monumental thing to get rid of slavery and people. it was a great thing. people savored that moment and struggled and tried to make lives for themselves.

what also happened is white southerners were left to do pretty much what they wanted with what they considered to be their lost property. in doing that, tried to bring things back as close to slavery as possible without it actually being slavery. in the process, never really gave up the notion that their their cause, their lost cause was a good cause. , erected monuments, had flags to keep the memory of the old south alive. and david blithe, as i am sure you all know, about the importance of reconciliation between the north and the south. when that took place, black people were left out of that. so slavery was over. we have on paper the legal right of citizenship, but not the actual accoutrements and status of citizens for a very, very long time. it is something we have been

fighting for up until this particular moment. after the terrible events that i mentioned, black students began to challenge the things around them that were the memorialization of slavery in ways that made their environment hostile. there was a different understanding. my generation grew up happy to be in these places, and sort of ignored these things. did not pay much attention to them. but this is a different generation, and there are good and bad points, and we will talk about this in the question and answer period, but really a fierce determination to claim these spaces as their own. in my own university, there was a controversy about the harvard shield. a representation of the family that had given land that was sold, started the harvard law school, had a shield with three bushels of wheat on it. people did not know -- i went to harvard law school, i had no

idea what that meant when we were there. wheat, i thought it was a symbol of fertility, knowledge and so forth. then we found out this was the shield of the royal family that owned slaves in massachusetts as well. this story was told to harvard students as they came in to the first year. in the past few years. this knowledge was not known when i was there. a number of students decided the shield should go. at oxford, students complained about the statue of cecil rose. others.arvard it was and other places. the naming of buildings. wilson at princeton, woodrow wilson at princeton. yale, the controversy over john c. calhoun. people suggested they should not have to be in places where

people who had done these nefarious things were celebrated. if you name something after someone, it is a celebration however you cut it. there was pushed back on this from people who said that history is history, and what you should do is not erase history. by erasing these memories. perhaps contextualize things. perhaps leave it as it is or totally get rid of it. those were the choices presented. i was on a committee that had to figure out what to do about the shield. my decision surprised a number of people. in this particular instance, i wanted to keep the shield but contextualize it, but change the way people thought about it. saying not all symbols are created equal, not all people are. their desire for celebration is a line drawing function. we do that all the time.

some people can be in, some people can be out. there is some ways to contextualize things. other things are just too awful to remain. it is a difficult question about what goes in and what goes out, but that is the conversation we ought to have. as a historian, we typically feel, or historians i have spoken to about this, tend to be against the idea of what they would call erasing the past. the question becomes, is moving something an erasure of the past? i thought and gave in my dissent the notion that in some instances, the shield to me was not like the confederate flag, which is an odd notion that after you lose the war, you get to continue to fly your battle flag. that you get to erect monuments to people who basically fired against, killed union soldiers, a flag that flew against the

united states of america. we accept it because we accepted the reconciliation david talks about as being necessary, more important than doing justice to african-americans. people, woodrow wilson. woodrow wilson is a more problematic figure. very, very racist. no question about it, a white supremacist, not a good guy. at the same time, he is the person who essentially made modern princeton, took it from being just a gentleman's club and made it a real academic institution. he actually made modern princeton. he was the president central to the school. john c. calhoun, not so much. i said that he could go. [laughter] annette gordon-reed: easily could go.

my advice was not taken. not givenactually was on that score. it was not on that score, but these kinds of questions are sort of very much go with what we talked about this morning, this notion of black identity and how black people see themselves in this particular moment, what they are willing to accept. what young people will accept. part of this post racial notion which is problematic in some other ways also comes along with it a very clear sense, clearer than i had, of themselves as being americans and having or should have, people who should have the rights of americans and wanting to create spaces for themselves. i don't want to use the term safe spaces, but i would say respectable spaces, is a legitimate question. part of the many struggles after

the end of slavery, but the struggle to belong, to be able to walk down the street. the struggle to feel comfortable in places is something i am very, very glad the younger generation has taken up. some of us mentioned earlier, how do you bridge the gap between the generations, older and younger? sometimes we don't talk to each other, use other language. members of the older generation say this is a trivial matter. there are more i important things to do. and there are always no matter how you slice it, but that does not make it a trivial matter. how comfortable you feel. are you american? can you walk around and not have your history, your people discredited by the worship of people who did not think you are human beings? how do you settle that? i don't have any easy answers to that, but i think it is

something that complicates the question about black identity, complicates our understanding of slavery and freedom and how we are going to take all of this in by focusing in on the human dimensions, the individual human mentions and the group dynamic, how people fit. and that is something that is very, very difficult i think to be settled on the question, certainly made in the pages of academic history. this is something that engages the public. it is something that engages not only the african-american public, it has to engage the white public as well. there has to be a confrontation, i think, a much more general and persistent confrontation to the idea that citizenship is about whiteness. i think there is no question in my mind that is something that is still part of the generalized understanding, that african-american people are interlopers.

there people who were not supposed to be here. and people who were not supposed to be here don't have the same rights and sort of comfort level that a number of whites feel that they should have, it is not something the blacks should have. i am very, very happy african-american students have challenged that. it is not an easy answer. i am an historian. i don't believe in destroying the past, but i also don't think changing the names of all buildings, removing statues, getting rid of accoutrements of the confederacy, having army bases named after confederate generals -- just an enormous concession to an ideology that we are still living under. it is an ideology of white supremacy that i think the students and their supporters have been fighting against. so this is a battle that i don't think is going away. and i am glad it was joined. thank you.

[applause] eric foner: we are going to turn in a second to questions from the audience. as you know there are the two , microphones up on the aisles there. people who want to contribute, please go to the microphones. while you are doing that, let me pose one question for the panelists here. you can answer yes or no if you want. going back to john hope franklin, is emancipation the pivot of the african-american, of how we ought to understand the african-american experience in america from the early colonial period, or do we need a narrative that really displaces emancipation and puts other changes or continuities at the center? who wants to take on that?

thavolia glymph: i could start by saying there is no one emancipation. i suppose by your question you mean the 13th amendment. and whether that should be the pivot, i don't think so. but i think emancipation more broadly should be a kind of way that we can talk about and establish some paradigms about the black experience. it does not have to be in 1865. it could be 1862 or new york at a much earlier time. sorry. oh, i am done. eric foner: anyone else want to? walter johnson: a lot of the conceptual frame for the paper that i just summarized and the way i try to think about these things is from karl marx essay on the jewish question. that is about jewish emancipation, the ability of

jews to become citizens in europe in the 19th century. when he writes in that essay is jews to become citizens inbasice greatest historical achievement of the standing order, but it should not be confused with the genuine human emancipation. for me it is important to try to , hold both of those things together at once. last night, a lot of the conversation was framed about the relationship between civil rights and black freedom, with a more thorough notion of black freedom. i don't try to think about these things as identical to one another. but nor do i try to think about them as necessarily contradictory. why not celebrate the extraordinary achievement of civil rights or the extraordinary achievement, extraordinary possibility of emancipation, and at the same time, insist on the notion that

it is not genuine human full thorough going notion of human freedom? i actually to some degree think it is important to point out as -- this is something i learned dude wroteook this this huge book about reconstruction. [laughter] walter johnson: it is important to point out some of the foreshortened characters of freedom, but to celebrate the achievements even as we insist on a more thorough going version of actual human emancipation. annette gordon-reed: i agree with that. it is the pivot, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. if you think about it in terms of citizenship practically before that time, , african-americans don't have citizenship. they are denizens of the united states, not citizens.

you can't make the claims we can make now without the 13th, 14th, 15th amendment. i am a law professor. legally, it is transformative. freedom and the wonderful light doesn't spring forth immediately. it does not change the fact that before those three things and afterwards, it is a change. we have no basis before then for even talking about the notion of citizenship. if citizenship is important in a republic and the country we are actually living in, you credit that as a sharp break. eric foner: thank you. first person at the microphone there. >> my name is marian anderson from concord, massachusetts. eric foner: can you speak a little closer? >> my name is maria madison from concord, massachusetts.

i represent a historic african-american site there. i have three questions. i want to thank you for this first, wonderful discussion. it was informative and profound. my first question is more of a statement or feedback to professor reed. i agree that it seems very difficult to start tearing down the symbols of atrocities that have been thrown on african-americans historically. i agree in particular because of collins aboutse how the first 14 president had slaves. if we first start tearing down symbols, it would have to be everywhere. washington, d.c. would have to , be renamed, for example. yesterday for example, i saw the korean war memorial and the individual troops in that field. it is powerful.

and in the spirit of of toni morrison, maybe we just need more memorials like that, individuals coming out of slavery walking across the field, walking away from a ship. that is my first -- eric foner: we have to limit you to one question. just in fairness to other people. does anyone want to respond? annette gordon-reed: i would say yes, we need additional monuments, but as i was suggesting before, not everybody is equally important to the united states of america. most of the confederate generals, there is every difference between being someone who is a founder of the united states and someone who tried to destroy the united states. so we can start with all of them. [applause] annette gordon-reed: that one is easy to me. it is not just from the standpoint of race. an insult to the union soldiers, people who gave their lives for the union to celebrate these people is just, it is

astonishing. other than what david talked about, this notion of reconciliation. people who with the notion of white supremacy, it is much more important for them to get along them do justice for justice for african-americans. i don't see how that's a question. washington is not going to be renamed. there is no country without george washington. you just have to take the bitter with the sweet and live with the reality of it. what you have to do is reinterpret and don't lie or hide things about george washington. but he is not in the same category as beauregard smith. [laughter] eric: one of the things people forget in this debate is the names of public monuments and buildings get changed all the time. come visit the arena in new

jersey. [laughter] eric: named for a former governor. who is no longer the governor. it's now the izod arena. or come watch the new york state theater, but now it's the david coke theater. nobody seems to complain we are racing history when we change -- erasing history when we change the name of something just because of money. [applause] i am a little skeptical. my feeling is we should add monuments. how many statues with all of the confederate generals are there in the south of black leaders of reconstruction? the only one i know of is one of robert smalls. maybe there is another somewhere. but you know, in other words the absences in our public displays of history are just important as the presences and they reflect the history that we talked

about. add onei just want to small thing. i think there is another position in this conversation between leave them up and take them down and that's the grassroots position which is to vandalize them. [laughter] --ter: you know, so i think if the society monuments alliances itself, -- monuments monumentalizes itself, it makes itself vulnerable. one of the things you saw across the south in the aftermath of the police murder of walter scott was people going and spray painting racist on these monuments. i think that is a grassroots but -- grassroots response, but it could be a vision of how we might go forward. annette: i think that's why calhoun is so high up there. [laughter] is way up there.

eric: you would be hard-pressed to vandalize him. let's go right here. >> thank you again. i am a native of tennessee. i am also a millennial. to your point about the monuments and the naming, i find not only is there a generational divide, but there is also a regional divide. the confederate flag does not garner the same response from me as my friends from new york or new jersey. untangling this conversation, it is all very passionate and personal. i wanted you to share some of your work. you said you are on a committee at harvard. and even how you said some symbols could go away, how do you engage those conversations in a manner of civility and professionalism, where you can manage all of the emotions. annette: our conversation was very civil because we are lawyers.

[laughter] annette: no. it was actually a model of collegiality, everybody had viewpoints and it was clear that i was in the minority. on that question. because it was easy, the thing i am describing three bushels of , wheat to mean anything. what i wanted was students to be able to say and take control of the narrative of what we were having a big ceremony for our 200th anniversary. we dedicate the shield and the school on behalf of the people who were enslaved at the plantation. the plantation was not about isaac royal, it was about the people enslaved there. it is not a picture. it's not the confederate flag. it is not a symbol. this was an easy one for me.

it turned out not to be so easy. but that is separate from a person or a flag. we draw lines all the time. is 65, so it is 75. we do it in our everyday life. this is a conversation people have to have to decide what can stay and what can go. there will be different views about it. but i believe it can be done. passion is part of it. but i do think that you need to keep the end in mind. it has to be between the community and if it is comfortable for the members of the community. if you have that goal in mind, you can put aside passion and your total focus on what you want and do the best for the institution or the community. eric: the next person here? >> hello. my name is kathy. i actually graduated from florida state in african-american studies.

i am very passionate about the topic. my question is for annette. it is regarding, there seems to be a sort of not a movement but a mythology going on around about irish people. and there and ventured servitude , so i wanted you to comment on that and the idea that people do not know about the difference of cattle slavery and other forms of slavery. annette: it's what you said at the end. people don't know the difference. people are ignorant of the differences. i think it comes from the fact that there has been a lot of oppression of different people throughout history. feel certainly that -- the irish have a right to feel put upon by the way the english treated them. there is a story of struggle as well. that was not slavery by birth. it was not cattle slavery.

irish people are by appearance white, even though people looked down upon them, they were able to assimilate into society in ways that african-americans have not been. it is people looking back and saying, look what happened to us. look what happened to me because the history of oppression in lots of different communities, this just so happens to be a central problem. chattel slavery was a problem from the very beginning, it prevented the creation of the union. it was the rock upon which the union split. so we don't really have that irish slavery,h or the irish understanding of slavery. to make him a that is a thing. and it is a way to put down african-american claims for rights at the present time to say everybody suffered and

suffered it just as much as you did. so it is as much a desire to claim oppression for themselves, but at the same time there are people in that group that are basically trying to minimize african-american oppression. eric: yes? eddie and i am from princeton university. you provoked me and i want to ask an interesting question. you've been provoking me for a while. [laughter] it seems to be at the heart of your paper to reject the idea of the booze walked -- the subject rooted in the distinction between header on a me and autonomy. this leave being treated as a means to somebody else's and that end. -- whatwould happened would happen to our history we reading aboutpped

freedom as an end rather than a practice? could we actually see freedom and other conditions of domination if we see freedom is a practice rather than an end? that is the question. walter: as usual, since we were long ago together in a seminar, my response is wow. eddie. [laughter] let me see if i can start to answer that. the first thing i think is in my mind, to a certain extent the history of slavery in the united states has been conscripted to the history of a particular notion of freedom. so when erica talks about a notion of history as slavery to freedom, i don't want to reid -- i do not want to repudiate that notion, but i

want to think about what we mean by freedom? meanen i say freedom, i economic freedom, or around sexuality or identity, all sorts of things i think remain part of the struggle. so what we get i think is a history in which enslaved people subjectivity into the notion of being liberal individual subjects. many were not. that's my first concern. the notion of freedom within slavery, if we can separate that, which i think is a problem, but from a notion i think that is in slavery, that is an interesting notion and a

challenging idea. i have used in my own thought various kinds of shorthands to try to describe that place for myself. which may have philosophical baggage i don't entirely understand, but i do try to think about flourishing within slavery. so what would it, how is it that we have a history of 400 years of slavery where nobody makes a joke? so to try to imagine that space for what is it like? the term and by slavery and yet is orthogonal to its domination. so i think it is a fantastic -- i mean, in a religious space would be another fantastic -- i mean, nat turner to me is a touchstone for me because of how profoundly obvious it is he limitations of a liberal understanding of

enslaved peoples subjectivity. one could equally cite harriet jacobs. map theo you try to categories of independent freedom on to harriet jacobs and her struggle. they mischaracterized that history. something?n i say walter: of course. annette: it is difficult to do what there because we are under siege. the moment you talk about slavery and making a joke, or freedom within slavery, you know that has real political consequences for african-americans. because people will seize upon that and use it as an excuse for constructing a particular way. clear it is absolutely there were people who made jokes, that people experienced something called happiness that we could recognize among themselves.

but it is just very difficult to do it in a society that is still hostile to african-american humanity. if we were in a different space, if we were among ourselves or people who believed in black humanity, it was clear that that was taken as a given, we could have those kinds of conversations without fear. it's difficult to have that without fear knowing how it would be used. walter: i think that's what i was trying to say. to talk about happiness and slavery immediately slips into the figure of the idea of a happy slave and that is why we talk about it. i should reference adam green, these are his ideas. [laughter] headlineo if this comes out, put adam's name on that. [laughter] i just want to say, years ago i learned something.

i could've gotten this wrong, my memory, but she said she often asked her students if slaves ever had fun. and i started asking my students the same question. just sitthink we can't back and say, it is too hard and too tough to try to overturn this paradigm. but when you ask students, it makes them think. and at some point you have to make those small incisions into the larger dialogue. if you say slaves were happy, it meant that they were happy to be slaves. so thank you elsa. is certainly right. all throughout that, that's the struggle, to deal with people who have a different

relationship, but to slavery, but who are enslaved. it's still tough to do it. because you have to write anyway that doesn't send that message, -- in a way that doesn't send that message, that i'm glad to be a slave. to the am going to turn audience again. and because we are running out of time maybe we will take three people and make comments on their questions. yes. student am a graduate at the university of maryland. i am studying historic preservation, but i did my undergraduate degree in history at the college of william and mary. while i am doing my preservation degree, the thing with thomas jefferson's statue comes up. everybody is putting stickers all over him. and i was at -- that one person who felt strange because you are

, but nota dialogue respecting other people. and how they perceive and interact with symbols and statues and places? so basically, my question is how we balance the idea of recontextualization and then thoughtful dialogue through different people's encounters with symbols and spaces? eric: yes, over here. >> i am with the national museum of african-american history and culture. examining this particular time, -- is,tion is, it as we as we are examining the past and looking to the future. there are a lot of digital initiatives taking place. what are the areas in which you feel like there are gaps or areas where we need to focus our attention.

the museum is involved in a crowdsourcing partnership to make the records of the friedmans -- freeman's bureau available online. we're going to take it a step further and we want to transcribe portions of that record to make them easily accessible to a wider audience. are there areas you think for this time that we need to focus on, records or du have thoughts about -- or do you have thoughts about how it it will transform the way in which you can do research and the way in which the academy may change or shift? eric: and the third? >> thank you. university of the college of london, united kingdom. we are 18 months into the u.n. decade for people of african descent. the british government have said that while they remain committed

to racial justice, they have no plans to officially record -- recognize the decade. empire, correct. [laughter] >> 10 years. my question to you is much like monuments, is it important for us to recognize this u.n. initiative? and if so, is it for the grassroots or should we have official recognition as well? eric: ok. recontextualization and dialogue, what should the museum be doing in terms of records of this era, and the u.n. decade and what we should do about that. anybody want to talk about one of those. ,nnette: recontextualization what you do is have a plan. have a plan. tell people what you want to

have happen. stickers are great. but you also need an alternative and there are plenty of ways you could have monuments or a plaque or a center, whatever. i think the best way to do it, if you are going to take something away or challenge something it helps to have a , plan. i think the history there is so rich, that should be an easy thing to do. eric: is anything going on in this country with the u.n. decade? here we go. >> i also worked at williamsburg. i was in the research department. they have a site called slavery in remembrance where it documents the slave trade all throughout from africa all around the americas. it's not just a site where you learn.

but if you are going to a place in the caribbean or something anyone to learn about that history, it tells you places you can go to learn about that history and monuments you can see. sorry. shameless plug. eric: ok. piece ion the digital have a small suggestion. which may reveal what a terrible researcher i am, but i often use the university of north carolina collection to look at slave narratives, which is a fantastic resource. it does not have facsimiles. it has transcriptions. to -- you know, i could use 19th-century slave narrative facsimiles. i would be very grateful for that. on the decade of people of african dissent, if you look behind some of these things that seem on the one level to be sort of white supremacist in their symbolism, you will find a deeper level of some white supremacy.

[laughter] walter: and i think that in relation to the refusal of the u.s. government to offer any kind of apology for slavery. because, as i understand it, there are legal implications for doing so. there are legal implications even according to the supreme slaveryat acknowledge as a wrong perpetrated by the united states of america. it opens a legal avenue to justice claims in the united states. so i would not be surprised if there is a similar thing happening. although knowing nothing. eric: the australian writer has a story about a law firm, and -- in american law firm that goes to australia and gives advice to companies about how to apologize, how to draft apologies of aborigines without legal liability.

the precise language they would have to use to do that. we have five minutes more. we may not be able to get everybody in. let the to another three people. go ahead. >> my question is for professor johnson. in your book, you put slavery at the center of capitalism. was that written as an argument for reparations? eric: next? over here. >> i am from the university of washington. thank you for those wonderful presentations. i just want to ask you to reflect on where scholarship on slavery and freedom has been and where it might go. it seems to me that maybe we should think about what it would mean or whether we should try to articulate the study of slavery and freedom to the ongoing

question of mass incarceration and to the question of the ongoing proliferation of slavery and other forms of bonded labor globally across the 19th century and up to the present moment. so i just wonder if some of you guys might be willing to reflect on that a little bit. eric: one more person over here. elizabeth and i from new york. ami have a question for professor johnson. i had a question about bond ships. ships to hear about the and africa and how it connects to what they were saying about franklin. how he talks about misconceptions people have about this idea of freedom. i wanted to hear more of your opinion on that. eric: these are all complicated questions. i will say, i appreciate your point.

there is, there could be a tendency when we celebrate emancipation to say just that slavery is in the past. it is a piece of history. but unfortunately, mankind like it is, slavery still exists today in large areas, not to mention mass incarceration. how do you link the 18th century to what is going on today is both important and tricky. it's not just to say ok, nothing has changed. we live in a different world and a different stage of capitalism. if that is what it was. and the forms in which these take are very different. that toess, connecting the past is also very valuable. reparations, johnson and freedom, mass incarceration. anybody want to jump at this? walter: to begin to respond, i

do think that's an overhanging question for all of us. it's a very pertinent question. of course, prisoners are excluded from the protections of the 13th amendment. and so slavery is constitutionally legal in the cost -- nation's prisons. and then people in the prisons are enslaved. that argument is being made right now by prisoners in alabama who are on strike. there are all ssorts of historical connection. there are resident symbolic connections. but there is also a very direct legal connection. i'm not certain that "river of dark dreams" is a text which is singularly committed to the project of reparations. but i have to say that

reparations for me has been an inexhaustible source of inspiration and insight. so it is colored by the idea that there isn't a clean dividing line between slavery and freedom and slavery is an active presence in our lives today. in a -- i think that really interesting way, that is part of what the intellectual contribution has been in the reparations piece in the atlantic. to really specify what an argument based on the political economy that came up to the presence -- to the president would look like. i think the shape of the arguments and point has been powerful and helpful for me. will end inspired by

the question last night about one word which would summarize everything. in the 1880's, the new york labor editor went to london and interviewed karl marx. what do you see for the future? marx did not say socialism or communism. he said struggle. that's what i see in the future. so i think one of the points of this history is the end of slavery did not mean the end of struggle. that will continue forever. thank you all very much. [applause] the panel, the audience, we now break for lunch. the conference reconvenes in this room at 1:40 p.m. see you all then.

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at the top, there is a quote written on a tribute piece that siteeft here at the crash one of the early memorials. and if we come over here to the exhibit, there are words at the top, some of them on the photo washe quote -- quilt that stitched together by susie byrd in california and a captain from the los angeles city fire department who wrote these at an ting whenning -- mee they were trying to decide what would happen with the memorial. this quote identified as really a preamble to a larger mission statement for with the memorial would be. when we came in from the outside of the visitor center and were walking the flight path as we did at the beginning, you notice

a common field. it was a tribute item left as a tribute to the passengers and the crew of the flight. watch the entire program on the flight 93 national memorial, sunday at 6:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv. flight 93go, united departing from new jersey for san francisco was hijacked by terrorists. next, author tom mcmillan discusses his book flight 93, the story and aftermath of 9/11. beginning in 1996, when the plot was first presented to us, bin laden, he details the story of the flight which crashes in pennsylvania on september 11. this was recorded in 2014 at barnes &